The End of the World is Near…Repent and Travel

Happy New Year’s!

The countdown begins…ten, nine, eight… Only this year, if you believe the hype and are secretly hoping you’ll never have to pay off your credit card bill, it’s a countdown to more than just a new year. In a few hours, minutes or seconds depending on when you read this (but let’s hope you’re not spending too much of your New Year’s Eve reading my blog – oh ok, go ahead and flatter me) it will be 2012; the doomed 2012 glorified by such films as the John Cusack masterpiece. Just kidding, that movie stunk, but I’m feeling quite generous thanks to the New Year’s champagne.

Now I know you are an intelligent human being who doesn’t respond to e-mails from Nigerian princesses begging you to transfer money on her behalf. You don’t click on the dancing internet pop ups that tell you you’ve just won a million dollars. You believe man has landed on the moon (or has he?) and are not worried that oatmeal is secretly killing you. You’re above all that hoop and nonsense. But deep down you, too, wonder if 2012 is the end; the end of the world, the end of civilization, the end of the need for blogging (gasp!). You’re not exactly running around committing heinous crimes or betting all your cash at the casino, but – admit it – you have stocked up on bottled water “just in case.”

Everyone knows – or at least everyone whose hair dresser is a conspiracy theorist – that the safest place to be when the

travel uninhibitedly

world comes crashing down is the southern tip of Africa. Don’t believe me? Just watch how excited John Cusack gets when he sees the tips of the Drakensburg Mountains sticking out from the flood that has engulfed the planet (that movie is educational and entertaining).

You might be laughing but others aren’t. The price of real estate in the mountains of Lesotho is at an all time high as worry warts desperately snatch up a bit of the tip Africa to call their own in case the rumors prove true. I find it funny that these new property investors expect the rest of the population to honor plot lines if the world does, in fact, come to an end. I’d be a bit more concerned about, say, survival than whether that boulder is in my yard or my neighbor’s, but that’s a different tangent.

But let’s take a break from our skepticism and imagine for a moment that the end really were near. Put aside your crying and despair. Think about what you would do if you had a full year stretched ahead of you that wasn’t dictated by your mortgage payments and dentist bills. Where would you go? What would you see? Of course you’d want to spend time with your family, blah, blah. But, again, don’t think about the sad part of only having twelve months left. Think about the opportunity it would present to have one full year to travel uninhibitedly.